AMERICAN TEST CASE
The state has a long history of ruling against individuals' bodily autonomy. Here's the story of one brave woman's fight for medical freedom. You'll never read this in a history textbook.
Revisiting one of the worst supreme court rulings of all time on the 94th anniversary of Buck v. Bell
On November 19th, 1924, 18-year-old Carrie Buck sat in an Amherst county circuit courtroom in Virginia with the fate of her reproductive system resting in the hands of her defense lawyer, Irving Whitehead.
Whitehead was a longtime friend of lawyer Aubrey Strode, the author of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, the Virginia law allowing the reproductive sterilization of inmates deemed ‘feeble-minded.’ Strode also acted as the lawyer for Albert Priddy, head doctor at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded who wished to sterilize Carrie based on her allegedly low cognitive abilities and promiscuous behavior.
On one of the most important days of Carrie’s young life, the only advocate she had available to her colluded with adversaries and purposely lost the case so it would be taken to The Supreme Court, just as Strode wanted. It is hard to believe the circuit court thought Carrie was represented by an objective advocate when the colony employing Dr. Priddy and housing Carrie as an inmate had paid the fees for Mr. Whitehead to represent her.
Purging Society Of Its Undesirables
At the turn of the 20th century, the concept of eugenics was becoming more widely accepted. Viewed as a viable way to improve the human species by getting rid of society’s undesirables, sterilization became a proposed method to achieve an ideal race when tactics such as segregation weren’t keeping certain classes of society from procreating.
Irving Whitehead’s complacency towards Carrie’s defense is obvious in the circuit court transcripts from November 19th, 1924. He called no witnesses of his own and barely cross-examined any of the witnesses Strode called to the stand. At one point, Whitehead struggled to even understand one witness’s familial relation to Carrie, clearly indicating he had done little prior research on her personal life or scanned Carrie’s available colony records.
Witnesses ranging from nurses to teachers who testified barely knew Carrie, yet based their ‘feebleminded’ label given to her off of one or two brief interactions. Other witnesses who were childhood neighbors were clearly uncomfortable on the stand, indicating their testimony could be skewed thus muddying the waters even more. This is evident during Strode’s examination of of neighbor John W. Hopkins:
“It is natural that it would be embarrassing to you to testify about these people- being neighbors-” [Strode]
“I know, but I don’t mind telling you what I know to be a fact.” [Hopkins]
Later during the examination though, it is clearly hard to tell what is fact to Hopkins, and what isn’t:
“Do you consider him [Arthur Dudley, a distant relative of Carrie’s] above or below the average?” [Strode]
“Well, that question is exactly like the other, and I answer it the same way.” [Hopkins]
“Yesterday you thought he was below, and today you don’t know.” [Strode]
“Well, I don’t know. That is right.” [Hopkins]
Words with negative connotations were often used by witnesses to paint a negative picture of Carrie’s family members but were seldom objectively defined. When using the word peculiar to describe some of Carrie’s relatives, many times their response was, I don’t know, when asked to state why they chose that word to describe the person.
Incorrigible was a word often used by Anna Harris, a nurse at the time in Charlottesville, Virginia who had spent some time with the Bucks, though barely knew Carrie at all. She used the word to describe Doris, Carrie’s half-sister. When asked to describe what she meant by incorrigible, she said, “Well, a boy or girl who won’t stay at home and won’t conform to the usual things that children conform to…”
Some witnesses didn’t even know Carrie at all. They were there as character witnesses for Carrie’s mother, Emma, also an inmate at the colony who was deemed ‘feebleminded’ and was a known prostitute.
Champions Of The Eugenics Movement
Aside from Carrie’s completely unfair trial, faulty tactics were used long before state law became involved in order to deem Carrie unfit to procreate. Eugenics was adopted by America’s elite class after it began getting some attention in Europe, though the term eugenics hadn’t yet been widely used. America’s top medical professionals, universities, politicians, and lawmakers used their power and status in a concerted effort to champion a ‘master-race’ as Eastern European, Jewish, Irish, and Italian immigrants came to America in record numbers. Poor citizens in the South were also often targets of the eugenics movement as northern states took a dim view of the region still reeling from Reconstruction.
In the Amherst county circuit court transcripts, New York doctor and eugenics champion Harry McLaughlin stated in regards to Carrie’s Virginia family when advocating for her forced sterilization:
“These people belong to the shiftless, ignorant, worthless class of anti-social whites of the south.”
His other reason for advocating for sterilization?
“She has [a] rather badly formed face.”
The feminist movement of the early 20th century became heavily involved in the eugenics movement as well before turning their attention to championing the abolition of alcohol in the 1920s. Popular feminist icon Margaret Sanger was an early adopter of eugenics idealogy, realizing it could be used to help get rid of future generations of poor African-Americans in New York where she was located.
In his book, Imbeciles, journalist and author Adam Cohen writes, “Women’s clubs filled their agendas with lectures on identifying the hereditarily defective and arranging eugenic marriages.”
Cohen goes on to detail the presence of the subject at universities in their curricula:
“Universities were quick to embrace eugenics and give it their intellectual imprimatur. Eugenics was taught at 376 universities and colleges, including Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley, and Cornell.”
During the infancy of the eugenics craze in America, one of the main issues faced by medical professionals were the invasive surgeries involved in rendering individuals unable to reproduce. Ovariectomies performed on women involved major abdominal surgery and the removal of much of their reproductive system. More often used as a means to an end was male castration. As inmates at state institutions were castrated, a light-hearted approach was taken towards the physiological changes the male subjects went through. Dr. Martin Barr, chief physician at Pennsylvania Training School for Feebleminded Children, once stated:
“...some nice male soprano voices could be obtained for the institutional choir,” when discussing the benefits of male castration. (Imbeciles)
In 1899, the vasectomy was invented and doctors advocated for its use to help keep criminals from “passing on their hereditary defects.” (Imbeciles)
By 1909 vasectomies were being conducted on criminals in prisons and inmates in state colonies. Not long after vasectomies began gaining popularity, the salpingectomy procedure was invented. In 1910, doctors began using this procedure on female subjects, though it was still considered to be major abdominal surgery and the mortality rate remained high.
Both vasectomies and salpingectomies were conducted on the feebleminded in state facilities as the procedures were being perfected. Ultimately, these less risky, less invasive procedures helped the possibility of eugenics spread like wildfire.
Binet-Simon IQ Test
Intelligence tests were a big part of the supposed scientific evidence used by supporters of eugenics to further their agenda. The Binet-Simon IQ Test was given to immigrants arriving in the country, inmates upon arrival to feebleminded colonies, and at-risk youth under the supervision of government social workers.
The Binet-Simon test administered in the US was inherently flawed. Its creators never intended it to be used as an intelligence test in the first place. It was simply supposed to be used to help identify children who needed some extra help in the classroom. Because of this, its co-creator, Alfred Binet, a psychology director commissioned by the Paris school system, admittedly did not put a lot of effort into deciding what the test would say. Binet stated:
“It matters very little what the tests are so long as they are numerous.” (Imbeciles)
When the test was brought to America, academics ‘transformed’ it into a scientific tool to put people into their predetermined caste system. Along with the test came a societal pyramid invented by research director Henry Goddard in conjunction with the American Association for the Study of the Feeble-Minded, which categorized test-takers as Idiots, Imbeciles, or Morons.
The more the test was administered by independent professionals to different groups and classes in America, the more startling the results were. Though many were troubled by the clearly erroneous results, the Americanized version of the Binet-Simon IQ Test continued to gain popularity across the country.
Large groups of Iowan farmers, immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, and army enlistees were all categorized as ‘feebleminded’ after taking the test.
Cohen writes, “...Robert Yerkes, a Harvard psychologist, administered a Binet-Simon-style test to 1.75 million U.S. Army enlistees. Yerkes worked with Terman, Goddard, and other experts to devise special mental tests for this group. Yerkes found that in this largely native-born group, fully 47.3 percent of the white test takers were feebleminded.” (Imbeciles)
After taking her test upon arrival to the colony, Carrie was categorized as a ‘middle-grade moron.’
Early Life
Carrie Buck was born to Emma Harlow Buck in Charlottesville, VA in 1906. From the day she was born, she never had a stable homelife. She never knew her father, Frank, and spent many of her days without her mother as well. In order to feed her children, Emma was on several different local charity lists to receive food provisions. She also turned to prostition for extra cash, and often moved her children around to stay with different men she was seeing.
When Carrie was just a young girl, she went to live with the Dobbs family. John Dobbs happened to come across Emma during his travels as an officer of the peace, and would later claim he decided to take Carrie in as an ‘act of kindness.’ Records show though Carrie was more of a maid for the Dobbs family rather than a foster child. After just a few years of schooling, they took her out so she could focus on her domestic duties full-time.
This arrangement lasted for several years without too many incidents. Reports from social workers detailed in Imbeciles show Carrie was very helpful to the Dobbs family and had a pleasant demeanor. However, when Carrie was just seventeen years old, Alice Dobbs (John’s wife) wrote a letter to The Commission of Feeblemindedness that would change Carrie’s life forever.
In her letter, Alice petitioned for the removal of Carrie from their home due to her ‘feeblemindedness’ which had allegedly grown progressively worse over recent years. Amidst a hearing by the commission, continued endless domestic work, and an uncertain future, the real reason Alice had written the letter came to pass. Carrie was pregnant.
At the hearing in front of the commission, she was visibly 7 months into her pregnancy.
Not long after that, she gave birth to a baby girl.
Shortly after the arrival of her only daughter, without any say in the matter, Carrie was shipped off to the same colony her mother Emma was now a lifer at, the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded. Her daughter Vivian was ordered to stay behind with the Dobbses. While Alice cared for newborn baby Vivian, she also helped her biological daughter with her newborn baby as well, who gave birth around the same time Carrie did.
Upon her arrival to the colony, Carrie was asked many questions regarding her time spent with the Dobbs family. During the interview, she confessed she had become pregnant by Alice’s nephew, Clarence, while he visited and forced himself on her when they were alone.
Though this rape allegation is often referenced in coverage of Carrie’s court case now, during her stay at the colony, county trial, and supreme court trial, it was never investigated nor made clear she could have become impregnanated due to rape. It was only stated repeatedly that when she arrived at the colony she already had a child out of wedlock which made her an ‘at-risk’ individual for getting pregnant again and producing another feebleminded child.
The goal all along with lawyers, doctors, and state workers involved in Carrie’s case was to get it to The Supreme Court. She was their ‘test case,’ though she was certainly never made aware of it. In their eyes, she was the perfect feebleminded candidate to show how beneficial coerced sterilization of ‘morons’ would be for society.
They wanted a nationwide precedent set via The Supreme Court that would protect individual states’ sterilization laws that had been passed and were already in effect. By the time Carrie’s case went to The Supreme Court, multiple states such as Ohio, California, Pennsylvania, and Virginia had passed various Asexualization Acts in the name of public health. With the wide range of passionate support from government in regards to eugenics, those involved in Carrie’s case were confident The Supreme Court would rule in favor of sterilization.
Asexualization Acts
The Asexualization Acts of the early 1900s stayed in effect long after eugenics-madness receded into the annals of history. Even though the term didn’t grace medical journals, women’s magazines, university curricula, or newspapers anymore, state-run prison systems still used the laws to their advantage as recently as 2003. Recently, African-American women came forward after time served in various California prisons resulted in their being sterilized without their official consent or knowledge before operations such as hysterectomies were conducted via state medical officials.
Buck v. Bell
Attorney Aubrey Strode eventually got his wish and the case of Carrie Buck was taken all the way to The Supreme Court. By that time though, Dr. Priddy had since passed on and Dr. John Bell was now the one who would be conducting Carrie Buck’s sterilization if the court ruled in their favor.
Presented with the evidence used at the circuit court hearing in Amherst county, on May 2nd, 1927, justices ruled 8-1 in favor of Carrie’s forced sterilization.
One of the most famous judges, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, wrote the decision concluding:
“Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
The decision set the precedent that the state could forcibly sterilize those who pose a risk to society by procreating and producing subsequent ‘feebleminded’ children. In a decision similar to how The Supreme Court would rule in Jacobson vs. Massachusetts years later, the judicial arm of the state made it clear collective society is more important than individual rights when it comes to the “protection and health of the state.” (Holmes)
It is easy to see how unconstitutional Carrie’s ruling is, as are many other supreme court rulings. Not only was Carrie denied due process because of Irving Whitehead’s known association with attorney Aubrey Strode and payments for his services were made by the colony itself, but her fourth amendment right to be secure in her property was clearly violated. Is her body not her property? If it isn’t, which the court clearly thinks it’s not, then whose is it? The state’s? The colony’s? If your own body isn’t your property, therefore protected under the fourth amendment, then what is protected? After all, sound, objective law stems from private property rights. If we don’t have those rights protected under law, then what law do we have?
If we fail to protect 18-year-olds like Carrie Buck, who were never given due process, who had their constitutional rights violated multiple times, and who were deemed to be property not of their own self but of the state, then the judicial system is not a pillar of law but a prostitute for it, filled with people who aren’t bought with cash, but sold to collective ideology and emotionally-charged rhetoric.
Carrie Buck was sterilized in October 1927.
More than 20,000 people were legally sterilized in California at the height of the eugenics movement.
Over 60,000 individuals in 32 states underwent compulsory sterilization procedures in the 1900s.
Carrie was subsequently paroled from the colony, the state finally allowing her conditioned freedom now that she posed no threat to future generations fearful of idiots, imbeciles, and morons.
Buck v. Bell still stands as one of the most egregious supreme court rulings even to this day.
Though state statutes have been repealed, the Buck v. Bell supreme court ruling has never officially been overturned.
“But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it.” -Lysander Spooner (No Treason)
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